From:
Richard Diller <dick@thedillers.net>
Subject:
Jerking the Wings off an F-100 in an Air Show
Buster McGee was the pilot of the first Thunderbird crash
and he was later an A-1 pilot.
The Thunderbirds were at
Laughlin for a graduation show about the time I arrived to start UPT and one of
their F-100s crashed, but McPeak's crash gets the publicity. I began to doubt
my memory of it (two at the same base only thirty months apart? What are the
chances?) until I found a picture of me standing next to an F-100 carcass with
the TBird paint job. It was about the second week of April, 1965.
This is from Herb Meyr on the
Spadnet. Buster said he had a flight control problem at rotation and
aborted. There was no cable for the tail hook so when he reached the over run
he steered the hun to one side of the approach lights and was doing ok until he
reached the railroad tracks. The fuselage went over the tracks, but the nose
and main gear were left behind. It came to a stop right next to the road.
Dick Diller
Former F-106 and A-1 Skyraider pilot oldie but goodie!
Kind of a long read - but I found it very interesting. What
a ride !!
Subject: USAF General Tony McPeak On ' Jerking The Wings Off
' An F-100 Over Airs...
Fascinating, interesting story! An accounting of events that
the public rarely learns about our military professionals.
Exciting yes, fun, no.
Del Rio could be the movie set of a West Texas border town.
It's windy, and the weather tends toward seasonal extremes. A large U.S. Air
Force Base 6 miles east of town is named after Jack T. Laughlin, a B-17 pilot
and Del Rio native killed over Java within a few weeks of the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor.
Our Thunderbird's Team flies into Laughlin on Oct. 20, 1967,
for an air show the next day, honoring 60 or so lieutenants graduating from
pilot training.
We go through the standard pre-show routine. Lead and 5 do
their show-line survey routine, while the rest of us walk the rounds of
hospital and school visits and give interviews. Next day, proud parents watch
as new pilots pin on wings.
At noon, we brief at Base Ops. As usual, an "inspection
team" comprising base and local dignitaries joins us for a photo session
before we step to the jets. The film Bandolero ! is in production near the
base, and its stars, Jimmy Stewart and Raquel Welch, show up in the inspection
team. Jimmy Stewart is a USAF Reserve brigadier general, a founder of the Air
Force Association and a big hero to all of us. Raquel Welch is . . . well,
she's Raquel Welch.
We're wearing white airshow suits, my least-favorite outfit.
Lead can choose from among gray, blue, black or white. But today, we look like
Good Humor men. Plus, I work hard during the demonstration and sweat deep soaks
my collar. This wouldn't matter much, except we do a lot of taxiing in-trail.
And with only 6 ft. between the end of my pitot boom and No. 5's afterburner, I
take a load of engine exhaust in my cockpit. Soot clings to the dampness,
leaving a noticeable " soiled ring around the collar " when I wear
white.
At Del Rio, I follow my usual routine and I roll the collar
under once we have taxied away from the crowd. After the show, I'll roll it
back out again, the chimney-black dirt still there, but now underneath, out of
sight.
We taxi short of the active runway for a " quick check
" pre-takeoff inspection by a couple of our maintenance troops. As No. 6,
I'm flying my soon to be memory acid-etched F-100 D . . # 55-3520.
We take the runway, the four-aircraft Diamond in fingertip
and Bobby Beckel and I in Element . . 500 feet back. The Diamond releases
brakes at precisely 1430. Bobby and I run up engines, my stomach tightening
against the surge of singular isolation. And thrill that comes before every air
show takeoff.
By this time in the season, the Thunderbirds' Team is really
' clicking along.'
We have a lot of shows under our belt. And know what we are
doing.
Twenty-one minutes into the event, it's going well--a nice
cadence and rhythm.
We approach the climax, the signature Bomb Burst. My job is
to put "pigtails" through the separating formation, doing
elevator-unloaded, Max-rate vertical rolls.
The vertical rolls require establishing a perfect up-line.
And more than a few also requires beginning the rolls with a ton of air-peed at
entry. I grab for altitude to swap it for the needed airspeed as the Diamond
pirouettes into their entry for the Bomb Burst. And at just the right moment,
dive after them, hiding behind their smoke trail.
The steep dive builds airspeed quickly using AB [
afterburner.]
The Thunderbirds had switched to the F-100, making us the
world's first supersonic flying team. I have to be mind-full of a hard-and-fast
rule :
DO NOT GO SUPER-SONIC DURING THE AIRSHOW.
No booming the crowd. So, I want to be subsonic. But just
barely. Let's say . . Mach 0.99.
The biggest mistake I can make is to be early in the
maneuver. The Diamond is about to break in all four directions, so if I get
there too soon, I don't have an exit strategy. Today, my timing looks good, so
I light the ' burner and start a pull into the vertical. We don't have a solo
pilot's handbook on board. But if we did, the handbook would say this maneuver
at this high speed would be allowed a 6.5 G pull.
If I get it right, I'll hit the apex of the Bomb Burst 5
seconds after the Diamond separates, snap the throttle out of ' burner ' to get
the smoke going, be perfectly vertical. And very fast. As the Diamond pilots
track away from one another to the four points of the compass, I'll put on
those lazy, lovely pigtails.
Then I'll click the smoke off and figure out how to do a
slow-speed vertical recovery.
But at Del Rio, it doesn't turn out okay. I start the
aggressive pull into the vertical.
The aircraft exploded.
Now F-100 pilots are accustomed to loud noises. Even in the
best of circumstances, the afterburner can ' bang ' pretty hard when it lights
up. It's also fairly common for the engine compressor to stall, sometimes
forcing a violent cough of rejected air back up the intake. Flame belches out
the oval nose--which will definitely wake you up at night--and the shock can
kick your feet off the rudder pedals.
Any F-100 pilot who feels/hears a loud " BANG ! "
he automatically thinks : "compressor stall." And he unloads the
elevator to get air traveling down its intake in the right direction.
So, instinctively, the explosion causes me to relax
stick-pressure to unload the airplane's centrifugal G load. But now. I'm fully
into one of those fast-forward mental exercises where seasons compress into
seconds, the leaves changing color while you watch. I move the stick forward
fairly lethargically, even having time to consider :
" That's NO COMPRESSOR STALL ! ! "
In retrospect, the airplane had already unloaded by itself .
. making my remedy superfluous.
But there was some pilot lore at work here :
No matter what else happens . . fly the airplane.
Forget all that stuff about lift and drag and thrust and
gravity, just fly the airplane until the last piece stops moving.
Good old F-100 # 55-3520 has quit flying.
But I have not.
And now there's fire. Flames fill the cockpit. I have to
eject. I grab the seat handles and tug them up, firing the canopy and exposing
ejection triggers on each side of the handles. I yank the seat triggers and
immediately feel catapulted into the slipstream.
Seat separation is automatic. Too fast to track, the
ejection seat is disappearing as I curl into a semi-fetal posture to absorb the
parachute's opening shock. Jump school helps here . . congratulate myself on
body position.
Then the chute snaps open. Much too quickly. Jolting me back
to real time and short-circuiting the transition from stark terror to giddy
elation, the evil Siamese twins of parachute jumping. My helmet is missing.
Where did it go? I look up and see a couple of chute panels are torn, several
shroud lines broken, and there's one large rip in the crown of the canopy. I'll
come down a bit quicker than necessary . . but there's not much altitude left
anyway.
Going to land in the infield, near show-center. Have to
figure out the wind, get the chute collapsed fast so as not to be dragged. Heck
! I'm on the ground and being dragged already. Get the damn chute collapsed !
Finally, I stand up, thinking I'm in one piece. And here comes a blue van with
some of our guys in it.
Then it begins to sink in. In 14 years and 1,000-plus air
shows, the Thunderbirds team has been ' clever ' enough to do all its metal-bending
in training . . out of sight. This is our first accident in front of a crowd.
And that dubious honor is mine.
I gather my gear and climb into the van. Somebody wants to
take me immediately to the base hospital, but I say : " I don't want to do
that right now. Let's go over and tell the ground crew I'm OK."
So we stop, I get out of the van, shake hands, toss the crew
chiefs an insincere thumbs-up.
Jimmy Stewart is still there and comes over to say nice
things, but Raquel hasn't stayed for the show, so no air-kiss. I'd given our
narrator, Mike Miller, some ad-libbing lines to do in the middle of his
presentation, and he stops to say maybe we should leave " that thing . .
what ever it was," out of the next show sequence.
That's when I learn that I'd jerked its wings off.
On most modern fighters, the wings are well behind the
pilot. You can see them in the rear view mirror or if you look back, but
otherwise they're not in your field of view.
Of course, I had been watching the Diamond, ahead and well above
me. I hadn't seen the wings come off.
All I knew was . . it blew up.
The F-100 has a large fuel tank in its fuselage, on top of
the wing center section and forward of the engine. When the wings folded, a
large quantity of raw fuel from that tank dumped into the engine. Then
exploded.
The shock wave from the blast propagated up the air intake
and blew the Super-Sabre's nose off, along with the first [ 6 ] six feet of the
airplane. The jet's badly-twisted after-fuselage liberated its drag chute. And as
it separately fluttered down. some of the awed crowd thought I was inside the
fluttering wreckage.
After exploding, the engine instantly shot flames through
the cockpit-pressurization lines. Conditioned air enters the cockpit at the
pilot's feet and also behind his head. My flying boots, ordinarily pretty shiny
for an ROTC grad, were charred beyond repair. I never wore them again. Where I
had rolled my collar underneath to protect the white show-suit appearance, my
neck got toasted.
I have no idea how fast I was traveling at ejection. I was
barely subsonic when the wings failed. But with the nose blown off, the F-100
is a fairly blunt object and would have slowed quickly. On the other hand, I
remained with the aircraft no more than a second or two after it exploded. So
there wasn't time to decelerate-ate much.
When I came out of the jet, the near sonic wind blast caught
my helmet, rotated it 90 degrees and ripped it off my head. It was found on the
ground with the visor down, oxygen mask still hooked up and chin strap still
fastened. As the helmet rotated, the helmet's neck protector scuffed my burned
neck causing some bleeding. [ Hmmmm . . no sharks to be concerned about.]
The Team keeps a zero-delay parachute lanyard hooked up
during the air show, giving us the quickest possible chute deployment. That
explained why my chute opened fast--too fast, as it turned out.
I didn't get enough separation from the seat, which somehow
contacted my parachute canopy, causing the large tear. The immediate,
high-speed opening was certainly harsher than normal, and as my torso whipped
around to align with the chute risers, the heavy straps did further damage to
the back of my neck, the body part apparently singled out for retribution.
Walking into the base hospital, I'm startled by my image in
a full-length mirror. Above, a sign says : " Check Your Military
Appearance."
Mine looks like I've crawled into a burlap bag with a
mountain lion. The white show suit is a goner, the cockpit fire having given it
a base-coat of charcoal gray accented by blood . . with a final dressing of
dirt, grass and sagebrush. Being dragged along the ground accounts for the
camouflage. However, I hadn't realized my neck was bleeding so much. I look
like the main course in a slasher movie --' The Solo Pilot From Hell.'
They keep me overnight in the hospital.. The Team visits me,
and Mike Miller smuggles in a dry martini in a half-pint milk carton.
Everybody's leaving for Nellis AFB the next morning. I tell the hospital staff
I'm heading out, too. And ask our slotman, Jack Dickey, to pack my stuff at our
motel. The 1967 show season is over.
After I jumped out, the F-100 continued on a ballistic
trajectory, scattering parts and equipment. Most of the engine and the main
fuselage section impacted about 2 miles ' downrange ' from my initial pull-up
spot.
All the bits and pieces landed on government soil, and there
was no injury or property damage.
My aircraft was destroyed--I signed a hand-receipt for
$696,989. But if there is a good kind of accident, this was it. Nobody was
hurt, and all the scrap metal was collected for post-game analysis.
The F-100 Super Sabre's wings mate into a box at the center
of its fuselage . . the strongest part of the airplane. When my aircraft's wing
center box was inspected, the box was found to have failed.
North American Rockwell, the manufacturer, tested the box on
a bend-and-stretch machine, and a section off the assembly line broke once
again under at an equivalent load of 6.5 G for the wing loading I was experiencing
when the wings departed.
It shouldn't have happened, since the F-100's positive load
limit is 7.33 G, but my F-100's wing center box broke along a fatigue crack. .
and there were about 30 more fatigue cracks in the vicinity.
Some then-recent F-100 losses in Vietnam looked suspiciously
similar. The recovery from a dive-bomb pass is a lot like my high-speed, high-G
pull-up into the Bomb Burst. In the Vietnam accidents, the pieces had not been
recovered, and the aircraft were written off as combat losses.
Later, specialists discovered considerable fatigue damage in
the wing center boxes of other Thunderbird aircraft. USAF immediately put a 4 G
limit on the F-100 and initiated a program to run all the aircraft through
depot modification to beef up the wing center box. My accident almost certainly
saved lives by revealing a serious problem in the F-100 fleet.
Merrill A. (Tony) McPeak
Note : USAF General Merrill A.McPeak flew F-100, F-104, F-4,
F-111, F-15 and F-16 fighters, participated in nearly 200 air shows as a solo
pilot for the Thunderbirds and flew 269 combat missions in Vietnam as an attack
pilot and as a high-speed forward air controller (FAC).
He commanded the Misty FACs, 20th Fighter Wing, Twelfth Air
Force and Pacific Air Command, and completed his career as the 14th USAF Chief
of Staff.
Source : Abridged from Aviation Week & Space Technology
: Contrails
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From: DWSkjerven@aol.com
Date: 1/10/2013 10:30:23 PM
Subject: Fwd:
Fw: Council 12 Safety Committee Update
In
case you guys are thinking about biding back to ORD. Or have 3 ex wife's and
still need a job.
ORD
taxiways...
Council 12 Safety Committee Update
To all Council 12 Pilots,
Please download the attached
chart. As you can see in the attached chart, almost
all taxiways at ORD are being re-designated. ORD is in the process of numerous
changes in STARs, SIDs and taxiway designation. These changes will be presented
in almost every chart revision cycle until Nov of 2013. They will continue
again in 2014.
Please use extra vigilance
regarding ORD chart changes.
We will try to highlight these changes coming
out as we get information. Your Safety Committee and Airport Liaison
representative are active in attending ORD monthly runway safety meetings,
working with numerous ATC working groups and task groups and working with other
domiciles to update you on system wide changes.
As you are well aware, there is a great deal
of work to do with many changes and the development and implementation of
NEXTGEN.
Attached is a chart with some taxiway changes
and designations in ORD.
Fly safe,
Capt. Kathi Hurst
Council 12 Safety Committee Chair
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